"Not the Retiring Type"Mercator's Worldby gayla mills

When Eben Smith talks about maps, his eyes glisten and his smile deepens. His right hand reaches to grasp his thick salt-and-pepper beard, then glides through the air as he describes the contours of his latest find. He speaks of topographic maps as "a wonderful bridge to another experience."

He talks of the day when he snagged his first mapping job after studying geology at Brown University. "I was about two years out of college, feeling lost, and one sunny day I went out to the Army Map Service and interviewed for a job," he recalls. "I was quite excited." While working in Washington, D.C., he would walk the halls at the U.S. Geological Survey's printing shop at lunch to see the new maps in progress, four or five thousand sheets in each press run. "The wonderful smell of the offset presses would fill the rooms like perfume," he says.

Smith spent ten years at Army Map Service plotting topographic maps from aerial photos, beginning as a multiplex stereo compiler. He loved and valued the work. "I felt that it was the person on the plotter who had the real job - it was transformed in your head from imagery on a glass plate to a finished map," he says. "And every map sheet was like a little artist's work--you put your soul into it." He then spent 19 years at the Army Foreign Science Technology Center, first in D.C., then in Charlottesville, Virginia when the office was transferred. He became a mapping, charting, and geology specialist and focused on foreign research projects.

After a lifetime of charting and drawing, researching, and mapping, Smith faced retirement with mixed feelings. Like many in his shoes, he wondered if the freedom he'd earned would compensate for the loss of the work he loved. He would still have the ten drawers at home of maps he'd collected through the years, but what of the journals, the colleagues, the work?

His fears proved groundless. He took on a number of jobs in Charlottesville, mostly short-term and volunteer: driving a van along the back roads of Virginia's Albemarle County, working in the county planning division, and helping to track and eradicate the virulent Virginia gypsy moth. Walking through fields and up mountain slopes, with only crumpled topos to guide him, he located gypsy moth egg masses and notified the spray planes overhead. He enjoyed the solitude and the search, observing the contours of the land and watching the maps' features materialize as meadows and slopes in the Blue Ridge foothills. "I've had a real love for topographic mapping since I was a teenager," he says. "It's a leap of the imagination to take a strange area shown on a map and try to imagine what it really looks like."

Then Smith found a project that satisfied both his passion for maps and his desire to help his community. In 1992 he joined the Rivanna Trails Foundation, a new group formed to promote a twenty-mile trail around the college town of Charlottesville. "I had dreamed of organizing a trail around the city for years," he says. "I had thought about this when I was working for the county planning office, because one of my jobs there was to draw a map that showed the green belt all the way around the Rivanna River from the Ivy Creek Natural Area to Milton. So when I heard that Francis Fife was organizing a group to build a trail around the city, I thought, boy, wouldn't that be interesting."

Because the proposed trail crossed miles of private land, the group needed to identify the owners of the land and obtain their permission for easements. As the cartographer in the group, Smith volunteered for the job. He overlaid 200-scale topographic maps with cadastral tax maps, which he rescaled to fit. "Sometimes there was so little detail shown on the cadastral maps that it was tricky to get them to fit," he says. "There were no streams, sometimes no roads, no structures, just straight lines with turning points. Cadastral maps are so featureless, and if you can't locate them in the field, you're in trouble." But walking the land helped, and gradually Smith identified the properties where the trail group wanted to build.

Then he went to the city and county tax offices and located the names and addresses of the property owners. Fife, the founding president of the Rivanna Trail Foundation and a former mayor of Charlottesville, used the information to contact each owner and negotiate easements, an on-going process that is still not fully complete. By 1993, after getting similar easements to property owned by the city, the county, and the University of Virginia, the group was able to begin the time-consuming task of clearing the first sections of land and building the first bridges.

Smith has worked with the foundation every other month over the last several years creating and maintaining the trail, a beautiful and wild band of green running along rivers and creeks, through tall oaks and past spring lilies. (The foundation hopes to finish the loop sometime later this year.) He's gotten a lot of use out of his lopping shears, swing blade, and hoe. As the group's recording secretary and photographer, he's also donated significant time and resources recording the progress of the trail's more than 400 rolls of film alone. His images have been used not only in the group's official records, but also on publicity posters, which he helped create. "Eben is one of the greatest assets that the Rivanna Trails has got," says Fife. "He's willing to do anything at any time."

Smith's surveying skills have often come in handy in determining where some portions of the trail should go. For example, one section of Moore's Creek seemed impossible to bridge -- the spot was vulnerable to flooding, and a previous bridge, built in the 1970s by Boy Scouts, had washed out. Smith climbed a trestle to get an aerial view and sketched the shore's contours. He located a sandbar upstream and determined that a crossing could be made there, which the group then completed.

Smith has also helped create a complete set of maps showing the trail's course as it meanders across city, county, and university lines. "It's a nice set of maps," says Smith. "Now all we need is a library where they can be made available for anyone who needs them." In the meantime, a smaller version appears in a trail guide.

Though much of his time has been dedicated to the trails group, Smith has found additional ways to share his cartographic interests with others. He helped a Girl Scout troop earn a mapping badge, possibly the only one of its kind in the country, by teaching the girls map-reading skills. On mastering those skills, the girls were awarded a badge representing a compass, sewn by one of the mothers. He also taught elementary school children about plate tectonics using maps of the region they were studying. And Smith helped a local teen, Paul Ely, earn his Eagle Scout rank by mapping a local area where Paul had blazed a trail; on the map Paul was able to record where the trail meandered through a hilly area onto a base topograhic map that Smith produced.

For Eben Smith maps have been a lifelong love, a sensual key to new places, a mathematical representation of elusive landscapes, a challenge, and a reward. And what does a map lover do when facing a mapless future? Chart a new course, naturally.

​(Sept 2002)

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